A car bomb ripped through Syria’s largest city of Aleppo on Sunday, killing at least 17 people and wounding 40 in one of the main battlegrounds of the country’s civil war, state-run media said.
The state-run TV aired footage of fire trucks trying to extinguish the blaze and rescue workers digging through mounds of rubble. Aleppo’s governor, Mohammed Wahid Akkad, was quoted by Syria’s official news agency, SANA, as saying 17 dead were civilians. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. SANA blamed terrorists, the term the regime uses for rebels. Opposition activists could not immediately be reached comment.
Earlier, Syrian troops bombarded a string of districts in and launched attacks across the country on Sunday as 28 people besides the 17 in the car bombing were killed nationwide in clashes and shelling, a watchdog said.
Shelling in Aleppo destroyed houses in the Midan district, a regime bastion that rebels have been trying to seize from their stronghold in Bustan al-Basha since Saturday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. “The bombardment of Bustan al-Basha has stopped but could start up again anytime,” a resident told AFP, after a day of fierce clashes.
A main water pipe in Bustan al-Basha was destroyed on Saturday, either by air strikes or the fighting, according to the Britain-based watchdog, while residents reported severe water shortages in the city.
The governor of Aleppo province, Mohammed Akkad, blamed “terrorists” for breaking the Midan water main as well as two other pipelines in Suleiman al-Halabi district. “Maintenance crews are in the process of repairing them and we hope that the water will return Sunday (today),” he told pro-regime daily Al-Watan.
Meanwhile, the Observatory reported at least two peopled killed in Hanano after heavy shelling hit a building in the eastern Aleppo neighbourhood, while clashes broke out in the adjacent district of Sakhur. The nearby neighbourhoods of Tariq al-Bab and Shaar were also shelled.
In Damascus, clashes broke out at the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp as troops bombarded the adjacent Tadamun district in the southeast, and the nearby suburbs of Al-Hajar Al-Aswad and Sayyida Zeinab, the Observatory said.
An activist video posted to YouTube showed plumes of black smoke billowing into the sky in the south of the capital, purportedly from a massive fire which broke out in Tadamun during shelling attacks.
Shelling was also reported in northwestern Idlib province, in central Homs province, and in the southern province of Daraa where seven soldiers were killed in an ambush by rebels at a military checkpoint, the Observatory said.
In Homs two bombs blew up a bus carrying civilians and troops, killing at least four people and wounding dozens more.
At least 1,267 people have been killed since September 1, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP by phone.
More than 27,000 people have been killed the uprising began in March last year, according to the Observatory, which collects its data from a network of activists, medical sources and others on the ground.
